Science

The Romans didn’t invent concrete, but they did establish its versatility. The structural ingenuity of the Baths of Caracalla, the Pont du Gard and the Pantheon would not be surpassed for a thousand years.

But if the dazzling concrete curves and cantilevers of modern architecture have matched the Romans’ for style and structure, today’s standard recipe, 2,000 years later, remains in some ways inferior.

New research into Pozzolanic cement, so named for the corner of the Bay of Naples where the ash of Mount Vesuvius facilitated its creation, shows the advantages of the Roman method. Their mixture for hydraulic concrete, a blend of volcanic ash and lime, has a tougher molecular structure than its modern equivalent. It’s unusually resistant to fragmenting and nearly immune to the corrosion caused by salt water. That’s why Roman jetties and port structures have weathered two salty millennia, while our maritime concrete creations degrade within a matter of decades.

So why aren’t we doing as the Romans did?

For one thing, the methods largely vanished with the fall of Rome. They really haven’t been examined at a very fine scale until now, says Marie Jackson, one of the researchers who has been studying the molecular composition of Roman seawater concrete. There’s been a general lack of knowledge about what the Roman model could produce — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Scientists have discovered that about one in thirteen people have flexible ape-like feet.

A team studied the feet of 398 visitors to the Boston Museum of Science.

The results show differences in foot bone structure similar to those seen in fossils of a member of the human lineage from two million years ago.

It is hoped the research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, will establish how that creature moved.

Apes like the chimpanzee spend a lot of their time in trees, so their flexible feet are essential to grip branches and allow them to move around quickly — but how most of us ended up with more rigid feet remains unclear.

Jeremy DeSilva from Boston University and a colleague asked the museum visitors to walk barefoot and observed how they walked by using a mechanised carpet that was able to analyse several components of the foot — via redwolf.newsvine.com

I recently read Natalie Dye’s response to a question about chimera DNA. As A Crime Scene Investigator and instructor this piqued my interest and has me wondering about DNA as it relates to bone marrow transplants. Would a person who receives a bone marrow transplant essentially now have two potential sources of DNA, the original pre-existing in the body’s cells and now another from the donor cells of the bone marrow? — via Understanding Genetics

Congenitally blind people have more accurate memories than those with sight, a study has found.

Experts at the University of Bath discovered that individuals with no visual experience had the most superior verbal and memory skills.

A team from the university’s Department of Psychology ran memory tests on groups of congenitally blind people, those with late onset blindness and sighted people.

Each participant listened to a series of word lists and was then asked to recall what they had heard.

Research has previously shown people can falsely remember words related to those said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In terms of output, Queensland University’s pitch drop study — the world’s oldest laboratory experiment — has been stunningly low. Only eight drops have emerged from the lump of pitch installed in the university’s physics building foyer in 1927. Watching paint dry looks exhilarating by comparison.

But excitement is now rising over the experiment, which was set up to calculate the viscosity of the world’s stickiest substance, pitch, which has been found to be at least 230 billion times more viscous than water. According to Professor John Mainstone, who has run the experiment since the 1960s, a ninth drop looks set to emerge from the pitch block in the very near future.

No one has actually seen a drop emerge, so it is getting quite nervy round here, said Mainstone. The other eight drops happened while people had their backs turned. For the last drop, in 2000, we had a webcam trained on the experiment, but it broke down … in 1988, when the previous drop was about to emerge, I popped out for a coffee and missed it — via redwolf.newsvine.com

How did the universe begin — and how is it expanding? CERN physicist Tom Whyntie shows how cosmologists and particle physicists explore these questions by replicating the heat, energy, and activity of the first few seconds of our universe, from right after the Big Bang